The chief mate activated the silent alarm next. It would have broadcast a distress signal from the ship’s satellite communications equipment and its radios, indicating a possible pirate incident, except that the communications gear was still a garbled mess—which left the opposite of a silent alarm as his only remaining option. He flipped up a plastic cover and pressed a large red button.

The general alarm.

The ship’s massive horn began to sound: seven short blasts, followed by a long one. Everyone within miles could hear it, including the pirates.

Outside, on the starboard bridge wing, a pirate checked the door handle. It was unlocked.

“Starboard, green,” he said over his radio.

The team on the port side did the same with the same result.

“Port, green.”

“Execute, execute!” came the order.

The pirates burst into the bridge.

Four men were standing in the middle of the room.

Two of them froze at the sight of the camouflaged gunmen and died where they stood, while a third crewman dove behind a bank of instruments. A pirate put three rounds into the man’s back and made sure that he never got up again.

The chief mate was standing at the helm, watching a pile of bodies form at his feet.

“Please don’t harm the others,” he said. “I’ll—”

He joined the pile.

Seven seconds after the door opened, the bridge was silent and the smell of gunpowder hung in the air.

The point man from the port-side team shut off the general alarm.

“I spotted six crew in here before the breach,” he said. “We only killed four.”

“Two squirters off the bridge,” the team leader said into his radio headset. “Starboard bridge team coming down.”

The three pirates hustled through the open doorway after the escaped crewmen. A few seconds later they heard several bursts of gunfire.

“The two squirters are down,” said another pirate. “We located the citadel—accommodations tower, echo deck, port side.”

The invaders had killed the six men on watch in the bridge, plus three others who’d made it to the saferoom, but a Suezmax usually sailed with at least twenty crew, plus the vessel protection detachment.

The pirates coursed through the ship, methodically dispatching the others. Men were shot as they approached the citadel, in the control rooms, and in their berths.

No quarter was given.

Not a man was left alive.

ELEVEN

JAKE WAS STILL on eastern U.S. time and working on his laptop when Pickens woke up. The big man strolled into the kitchen wearing gym shorts and a double-extra-large T-shirt that was still a size too small. Though he hadn’t played football in twenty-three years, there wasn’t an ounce of fat on his two-hundred-forty-pound frame.

“Do you have mobile phone numbers for the contacts we’ve met?” Jake said.

“Most of them,” Pickens said as he poured himself a cup of tea. “What’s up?”